Riverbed SteelHead Enables IAT Group Employees to Write Insurance Policies Four Times Faster Whether in Office or the Field

San Francisco—December 08, 2014— Riverbed Technology (NASDAQ: RVBD), the leader in application performance infrastructure, today announced that IAT Group is using Riverbed® SteelHead™ to help its insurance agents and field investigators work more efficiently with their most important software application, Vertafore's ImageRight, an insurance management system. Agents can now complete tasks such as writing policies, which took 90 minutes to two hours or more because of slow access and delivery over the wide area network (WAN), in 30 minutes or less. Because of such productivity improvements, as well as cost-savings, IAT Group realized a return on investment (ROI) of ten months with its SteelHead deployment.

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Headquartered in Raleigh, North Carolina, IAT Group has 18 offices around the United States and operates three large data centers in Omaha, Raleigh, and a suburb of Chicago, where software applications have been centralized. Business critical applications used by IAT Group include Verafore's ImageRight, AS/400, AcroSoft and Microsoft Exchange.

ImageRight, housed in the Omaha data center and run on AS/400 servers, did not perform well for IAT Group when the application was first centralized. "The AS/400 is not network friendly. It's very chatty," explained Ryan Smith, a network engineer at IAT Group. "It used to take some underwriters up to two hours to write a policy and most of that time was spent waiting for the system to transmit information."

IAT Group researched WAN optimization solutions and found that SteelHead was "ahead of all the competitors." The company purchased SteelHead appliances for its larger branch offices as well as the company's data centers. IAT Group also purchased SteelHead Mobile for field investigators who work remotely.

SteelHead compresses ImageRight data by up to 99% to achieve such a level of application acceleration. "It's now a dream to use AS/400 across the WAN, and we're doing business more efficiently," said Smith.

Before the SteelHead deployment, IAT Group employees accepted the slow WAN and therefore slow application performance as unavoidable. "I think a lot of people here just had an acceptance of poor performing technology," explained Smith.

"We've reaped the benefits for all the other WAN-enabled software and the investigators have seen a big difference," said Smith. Other employees have benefitted as well, such as a SQL database administer who does a lot of copying of CIFS files between his home and his office at headquarters. His copying tasks used to take hours, but now take a few minutes. Another employee, who uses Information Builders WebFOCUS to analyze data on the AS/400s, finds that jobs that previously took several hours to run are now completed in minutes.

"Two years after the initial deployment, we are still amazed by what great products these are," said Smith. "The benefits are tremendous."

Riverbed SteelHead and the Riverbed Application Performance Platform™

Riverbed SteelHead is the industry's #1 WAN optimization solution that helps IT ensure optimal service levels for applications among data centers, branch locations, cloud networks, and end users. SteelHead, further, allows IT to prioritize delivery of mission-critical applications over the best available network with customized per-application service level agreements (SLAs). SteelHead pioneered WAN optimization in 2004 with unique innovations for application, transport, and data streamlining across the WAN and Internet to deliver the best end-user experience regardless of location while dramatically reducing network bandwidth costs. With SteelHead, enterprise and SaaS applications can be delivered up to 33x faster while using 97% less bandwidth.

Riverbed SteelHead is part of the Riverbed Application Performance Platform™, the most complete platform for the hybrid enterprise to ensure applications perform as expected, data is always available when needed, and performance issues can be proactively detected and resolved before impacting business performance.

Riverbed®, The Digital Performance Company™, is united in our purpose of Advancing the Human Experience in the Digital World. Behind every digital experience is a human one, and Riverbed enables organizations to measure digital experiences and maximize digital performance so they can deliver better and more powerful human experiences— for customers, employees, partners, patients, and citizens. Riverbed’s Digital Performance Platform includes a combination of Digital Experience Management and Next-Generation Infrastructure solutions that ensure superior digital and user experiences, provides new levels of operational agility and accelerates business outcomes. Riverbed’s 30,000+ customers include 100% of the Forbes Global 100. Learn more at riverbed.com

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